Game: Anti-strategic plan

As my library embarked on a strategic planning process, there was some skepticism. These endeavors in the past had been painful, tedious and ultimately ineffective. We'd make plans, but then external forces would intervene, there was never any money, and the plan was shelved. This time we are taking a new approach to the plan, and to give everyone an opportunity to vent frustration and skepticism of the past, we included an activity we called the anti-strategic plan: releasing our un-values.

How to play:

• Provide a prompt contrary to your values. Ours was: "The library is a research environment that maintains the exclusive and inaccessible nature of information."
• Have group brainstorm values to support this prompt.

Debrief:

• Talk about the cathartic nature of releasing previous negative experiences and connotations of process.
• Look at how expressing the opposite of what you value can lead to clarifying what you do value

I got several positive comments about this activity after our strategic planning kick-off meeting. And it was a lot of fun. After we got going, it was hard to stop, and it did allow us to confront the negativity head on and move past it.

This idea was inspired by a game in Thiagi's 100 Favorite Games (Sivasailam Thiagarajan), called Double Negatives